Software developers increasingly use specialized Agile tools, such as Rally and Atlassian JIRA for individual tasks, but with many teams working simultaneously on products at every stage in the definition and development lifecycle, it's easy for information to get lost and for teams to lose sight of the bigger picture: what's being built, why it's being built and how to track progress.

A new alliance between agile workflow solutions company Jama Software and enterprise collaboration technology firm Tasktop aims to seamlessly connect data from all these tools into a centralized repository, the Jama Integration Hub, giving all stakeholders greater insight into tasks and workflow, says Jama Software CEO Eric Winquist.

A Single Source of Truth

"Having a single source of 'truth' is the key to efficient software product delivery. Data housed in disconnected tools complicates information sharing, prevents collaboration, hinders decision-making, and, ultimately, delays time to market. At Jama, we believe that when teams are aligned around a shared understanding of what is being built and why, the end products deliver yield greater business value, and faster," Winquist says.

The partnership between Jama and Tasktop, an enterprise-class integration bus that enables collaboration across software teams, gives IT organizations the capability to integrate the most widely used software development tools - including JIRA, HP QC, Rally and Microsoft Team Foundation Server - and speed up product delivery, says Tasktop chief product officer Dave West in a statement.

Better Insight for Faster Product Delivery

"As software increasingly drives product innovation, product teams are charged with scaling agile practices across the organization. Core to this is real-time collaboration and iteration among groups from strategy through definition, development and quality assurance. With the new Jama Integration Hub, customers get seamless flow of information across teams and traceability among artifacts such as requirements, features, use cases and defects," says West.

The Integration Hub is a critical component of Jama's Agile Workflow Design, and draws on Jama's seven years of experience optimizing collaboration among teams and making sure customers' delivery environments are uniquely configured to align with to their organization's process and methodology.

This new offering, combined with direct connectivity to agile development tools, gives Jama users a tangible framework for how to scale Agile across the enterprise, says Eric Nguyen, director of business intelligence at Jama Software.

Making Agile More Agile

"One of the major challenges our customers face is translating the software engineering requirements into language their developers could understand, while tracking and coordingating collaboration to make good on those requiements," says Nguyen.

"So many companies are using agile practices to accelerate innovation, but the iteration process was almost too fast - teams were having problems keeping up with each other, and the level of complexity became a problem. We needed a way to help customers coordinate those small batches, and to tie them into the overall product strategy and the business strategy," Nguyen says.

The alliance with Tasktop will allow for a real-time, single-pane view into the entire lifecycle of software projects, and help streamline the entire product delivery system, says Nguyen. "We have the workflow expertise, and Tasktop has the technical specifications and integration expertise. Our vision is to better allow customers to better integrate specs, requirements and larger business strategy with task management, collaboration and workflow coordination," he says.

Both the Jama Integration Hub and the Agile Workflow Design solutions are available immediately to Jama SaaS customers.

This story, "Alliance allows for better collaboration in software development" was originally published by
CIO.

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